Some New Highway

The Non-Linear Path Of The Swimming Pool Q’s

by Jim Winders

Some bands stage reunion tours, and maybe reunite long enough to manage a nostalgia-drenched new recording. Some, improbably, enjoy a second incarnation, however short-lived. But a few stalwart ensembles never really disband, however dormant they may appear. Like reptiles, they may hibernate for a spell. Such is true of Atlanta's The Swimming Pool Q's, who have just released a toweringly ambitious album they have worked on for more than a dozen years. Handsomely packaged with a stunning cover that features a classic Japanese print, Royal Academy of Reality (Bar/None Records) offers a challenging, complexly layered sound that defies expectations based on what the band sounded like when it sprung from the late 1970's Atlanta avant-garde scene The link between those days and now is Jeff Calder, the tireless keeper of the Q's flame. He co-produced the new record with Phil Hadaway, and, over many years through his activities as both musician and writer (and more or less historian of an almost-forgotten era of music), Calder has remained the impresario and driving force that has kept his band going against all odds.

Jeff Calder: It's a strange place to be (after 25 years), because I can't think of many bands that have been together this long, and I can't think of any that have been so spectacularly unsuccessful - commercially, I mean.

Flagpole: The album took a decade or so to make, and I guess you could say it shows a lot of ongoing musical evolution, and you must be incorporating a lot of styles and influences that interest you.

JC: Yes, I suppose the bulk of the recording took place between '93 and '98, and then from that point forward we adjusted things, we mixed things, remixed things, and then Anne came back on board and we tried to speed some of the tracks up so she could sing them, because she sounds really beautiful singing them - say, "The Deep South," for instance. We do it live a whole step higher than it is on the record. It's in D on the record and it's in E when we do it with her, and she sounds really beautiful singing the song. But whenever we tried to speed those tracks up, it was out of the question to re-record them, which is not an unusual thing, because many bands have done this - The Beatles used to do it quite a bit. When we tried to do that, the song just kind of lost its feeling. So after a year or so of trying to accommodate this, I just kind of threw in the towel and just accepted things the way they were, as far as that goes. As far as incorporating the different styles and things, we kind of had an idea at the very beginning of how we wanted to be, but as we went along, different things would present themselves. We would begin experimenting with some sort of unusual instrument, and then all of a sudden the song would go in another direction or would open up in a way that we'd never anticipated. And we'd just have to sort of go with that.

FP: I get a lot of different associations from listening to it. I was wondering whether your playing with Glenn Phillips might have entered into it.

JC: Well, uh, maybe. Playing bass with Glenn, it's a totally different world, and I didn't grow up playing the instrument, so I kind of had to learn it on the spot. I just had to learn bass playing from scratch, and it's not an easy thing to do. It's like learning a foreign language. I mean, most people that I know who are good bass players have been playing since they were very young, and they just don't even think about what they're playing. They just feel it, you know, and with me as a guitar player it was a whole new learning experience. I knew what a bass was supposed to do, and I could tell when I was producing the record when it was working and when it wasn't. But it's another thing entirely to be able to execute it. I guess as we went along making the record there was more of a heightened awareness of rhythm, especially on tracks like "Yesterday's Rain" - like nothing we've ever done before, very rhythmic, groove-oriented tracks. And I'm sure that playing with Glenn helped me kind of focus on that. We made the record under unusual circumstances. We were fortunate that we had access periodically to Southern Tracks Recording, which is a beautiful recording facility here in Atlanta where Brendan O'Brien does a lot of his work. But then I'd have to drive to Savannah where Phil [Hadaway] has a nice little studio [Reel Time] over there, but it was a lot of traveling back and forth. And then we would cut things with remote recorders in our rehearsal space, in houses, in practice rooms, the new assembled it all and got it into 48 tracks - two 24 inch reels, analog. Am I making sense?

The band never entirely packed it in, although 1989 was the last year in which they offered a new studio album. By the late 1990's, vocalist Anne Richmond Boston, relocated from Atlanta to Athens since 1993, began appearing with her bandmates once again (she had departed after the third album appeared in 1986). The current lineup includes founding members Calder and Bob Elsey, longtime drummer Billy Burton, and new bassist Tim DeLaney, representing a younger generation. Under Jeff Calder's supervision, the Q's' reissued their debut album The Deep End on CD late in 2001, generously augmented by additional tracks and an unusually entertaining, readable, informative essay by the aforementioned Calder. Calder is a gifted writer, whether the prose is to be accompanied by music or not. His essay "Living By Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band," closed out the anthology edited by Anthony DeCurtis called Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture (Duke University Press, 1992). It's a witty, irreverent memoir of struggling to make it in the brief era (ca. 1978-1984) during which the South appeared receptive to adventurous pop music. Calder was by no means the first to point out the relationship between critical acclaim for a band and dire financial straits, but no one has ever described this predicament with such disarming good humor.

JC: I think when you've been together 25 years, and you have such longevity a s a group, it really isn't a linear evolution anymore. The band is like a totality, with all these branches or root systems, and this was just another one another root system or branch. And the other parts of the band's totality don't go away, because we still play the same songs that we played when we began the group. And those songs are fine to play and they're rocking, and they have narrative approaches to the songs. All of that's very rewarding. I may be speaking for myself here, but I've never been one of those people who would like to discount or reject all the earlier work. I mean, a lot bands are like that. For our band, all that we've done in the past is alive now, and this is just another thing. So maybe the next record will have complete departures from everything we've done before, but it may be something where we try to consolidate those elements which is somewhat the way I'm thinking about the next record.

Last year, when The Swimming Pool Q's played a gig at Tasty World in Athens to celebrate the reissue of The Deep End, I spoke with Calder about the music scene out of which his band emerged in the late 1970's. The most enjoyable part of the interview was when Jeff discussed the era of Atlanta's underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird and the outré musicians that wonderfully subversive publication tended to promote, including the Hampton Grease Band (Calder heard them play in Macon while he was a Mercer student). Even more obscurely, he waxed eloquent about Thermos Greenwood and the Colored People (so named because the musicians painted their faces different colors for each performance - eat your hearts out, Blue Man Group), The Nasty Bucks, The Fans (compared to Wire with an Eno/Cale influence), and The Brains. All of this limns an era of Atlanta underground music rapidly receding into oblivion. Thank God for historians like Jeff Calder. I asked Calder about the difference between the music/performance scene in the Q's early era and that of today. He lamented that the scene today is much less receptive to anything not mainstream. The bands of today are "fraternity acts." Of course it's easy to pick on Dave Matthews, but he is a convenient example. I asked what he hoped a 2002 audience would get out of hearing his band, and he replied "People are not used to seeing bands with a broad background in performance capabilities. I would hope that people would get the impression that it's just an excellent band." Amen to that. I also talked with the wonderful vocalist Anne Richmond Boston, and she provides a much different perspective on The Swimming Pool Q's. Now a graphic designer with Hill Street Press of Athens, she is, shall we say, much less invested in the band's history than her colleague Jeff Calder. Remarking on her renewing her involvement with the band after a break of many years, she addressed the question of what seems different today. "It's much more fun," she said. "I'm not doing it with the idea that something's going to happen; that we're going to get to sleep in our own hotel rooms!" I asked her about her bandmates, and she was characteristically affectionate and generous. The first point she wanted to make was that "I think the unsung hero of the band is Bob Elsey. He just amazes me every time we play. He's just the best. And this new bass player has added a lot of energy to the band. And of course Billy Burton."

Her sense of enjoyment was evident when the band played their set in January 2002 at Tasty World, charging through the most memorable tunes from The Deep End (e.g. "Rat Bait," "The A Bomb Woke Me Up," "Big Fat Tractor"), but also songs from their A&M records like "Celestion" and "Some New Highway." Anne sang "Gimme A Room," from her solo debut The Big House of Time (1990), and the band worked in "Light Arriving Soon," which opens the new album. It was a thoroughly enjoyable, exuberant outing, and it whetted my appetite for the opus with which the band has now reasserted itself. On Royal Academy of Reality, be prepared for some surprises, because Calder & Co. have pulled out all the stops to achieve an experimental new sound that displays a band evolving away from its earlier sound, yet without some kind of sharp repudiation of all they represented in the past. A recent conversation with Jeff Calder sheds light on the challenge afforded by the new album

Flagpole: The first thing I would say is that this is a very complex and complicated album that requires repeated listenings. Once in a while, a BobElsey guitar lick or an Anne Richmond Boston background vocal gives hints of the old Swimming Pool Q's. This is really not a record for which the back catalog of the Swimming Pool Q's could have prepared anyone

Jeff Calder: Possibly, yeah. I mean, I don't disagree with you about that. It was made over such a long period of time that, had we been able to put out records every three years during that time it may be that that would have culminated in this record, and it wouldn't seem quite so dramatic. I mean, that's an issue and a possibility, but on the other hand, we did three of the songs on the album: the opening track "Light Arriving Soon," "Sky Land," and "For No Reason. We did the basic tracks for those songs in December of '92. And then we spent two or three years working on them, trying to get good vocal takes because there were vocal issues for me, and by the end of '94-'95 we had aworking model. So those three songs have an element that the rest of the record has. I guess you could say that we took quite a leap, even that far back.

 FP: What were your "vocal issues?"

JC: Well, in '91 I had a bout with Bell's Palsy. It's a violent infection of a cranial nerve... [I]t's very common, and basically one side of your face just droops. And about 90 percent of the people who get it recover. I had a friend, Rodney Mills, who mastered this record (Royal Academy of Reality), and produced Lynyrd Skynyrd - he's sort of a famous producer in Georgia - he had Bell's palsy on both sides of his face. It was quite traumatic

FP: Are you saying that it's something that musicians commonly might get? 

 JC: I don't think so. What happened to me was, and this is something that I couldn't really find out any precedent about in any literature. I don't know that Bell's Palsy has struck enough singers for this to be commonplace, but what happened to me was that it paralyzed my vocal chords. And this is sort of darkly comic, but the entire middle range of my voice (which is sort of what my voice is) was erased. And the only things remaining were the extremes: an octave higher than the very highest notes I could sing and an octave lower than the very lowest notes I could sing. And there was no control over either of those areas of the vocal spectrum. This lasted for maybe three or four months, so I would sing and it would bounce between this unbelievably sort of Minnie Ripperton high note all the way down to sub-wolf, like Darth Vader. I mean, it was funny, but I didn't know whether I was going to recover from it. Unlike most people, I still have residual effects from this, but it took many years for me to regain any kind of significant power in my voice, and I had just begun to regain some power over it when we began tracking the vocals for those first three songs that I just mentioned. And, even though I had control over it, I didn't have a lot of power. So it was very frustrating for recording engineers and for me to try and sing these songs - which required a whole different mentality anyway, because of the nature of the songs, from anything I had done before. So I had to set up a recording situation at my house, and record dozens of vocal tracks there in '93. And then we had to assemble the vocals for those three songs here using early versions of what would be ProTools computers now. It wasn't that long ago, but it was still very limited as opposed to what you could do now, with any kind of quality. I guess you could say that we took quite a leap.

FP: I wanted to ask you about some of the instruments. You've got all kinds of stuff on here: clavioline, mini-Moog, Yamaha CS-50, Arp string ensemble - it's quite an arsenal.

JC: Well, you know, Phil and I - I had been collecting these analog keyboards since back in the early '80s, I think, or late '70s, when people thought it was just a joke. [B]etween my keyboard collection and Brendan's keyboard collection, which was quite extensive (for instance, the Baldwin electric harpsichord, which was Brendan's, was a very rare piece, the big Hammond organs, and so forth). Between the arsenals, we had a lot of keyboards, and Phil, the co-producer, was really into it. We were trying to make something that was different from what we'd done before and from what guitar bands normally would try to do, while still trying to retain this guitar band kind of a thing. It was sort of a balancing act. We would experiment with some of these different keyboards, and Phil is a very good engineer. You can tell from listening to the record that he's very talented.

FP: You know, this album is taking a while for me to absorb. I'm still finding things...

JC: You know something that wasn't a concern, because it's a 70-minute album, is that, every time we tried to streamline it down to 14 tracks, we didn't like it. I mean, the excessiveness of it is part of the character. It's asking a lot of people to tackle a record like this, but so far there haven't been too many complaints. It's gratifying that people would go to the lengths they go to listen to it, because it's the kind of record that does require some attention.

FP: I have to ask also, about live performance, are you going to be doing this with the usual line-up of The Q's? Or, when you perform live are you going to be falling back more on the old repertoire?

JC: We've been rehearsing some of these new songs. Some we've played anyway, and some we haven't... I'm toying with the idea - it will be quite an undertaking - but I'm toying with the idea of in late summer, early fall, whenever I can find a place to do this, to try to mount the entire record from beginning to end somewhere. I don't want to do it in a club environment, but

FP: It strikes me as ambitious.

JC: Well, we couldn't get everybody that played on it to do it, but we could get a couple of keyboard players, like Tom Gray [of the Brains], our vibraphone player. [H]e wrote "Money Changes Everything." He's a reallywonderful musician. You can really hear how beautiful his dulcimer playing is at the end of "Light Arriving Soon.

FP: I noticed that.

JC: It sounds really good, and his lap steel playing at the end of "Skyland" fades out, and he plays on "Out of Nothing" also. But I'd like to try to do it, and I don't know whether we can or not. I think we could do a significant number of songs from the record, just by ourselves.